How can you go job-hunting while your team is preparing to play for the national championships? That’s for you, Brian Kelly.

How can you fire your coach in the middle of the season, with four freshmen who now won’t even play a full season for the man who recruited them? That’s for you, USC.

How can anybody mouth the words “commitment” or “loyalty” with a straight face—especially to the actual athletes—ever again?

That’s for the entire hierarchy of college sports.

It’s not as if they haven't noticed how two-faced they are about such things. It gets pointed out all the time, at this time every year, when the college football coaching game of musical chairs stops. If coaches aren’t flirting with different schools and the schools are flirting right back, then they’re doing like Kelly, the coach at Notre Dame, and his counterpart at Oregon, Chip Kelly, did: courting NFL teams, and vice versa.

And if it wasn’t going on while their players were getting ready for their final, most important game of the season, it was being hinted at, anticipated and speculated. If these leaders of men actually do decide to move on to bigger and better things, occasionally they take time to let their players know. Routinely, they clear out before the actual game.

Nobody even bothers to flinch about it. The two Kellys (no relation) and their teases already have been forgiven and forgotten at their respective campuses.

In the meantime, it is mentioned in passing that, you know, the players couldn’t shop themselves around to other schools like that, or thoughtfully weigh the option of going pro. Not without a few dozen restrictions, or pejorative labels for making a selfish, disloyal, short-sighted decision, stuck on them. Or both.

That sort of casual betrayal of what higher education should stand for, revenue sports or not, barely registers anymore.

The way Kevin O’Neill just got fired, though, is another level of heinous.

One of the cornerstones of college sports’ sales pitch to the public is that it’s not like the pros—besides the normal reason, because the players don’t get paid. Add to that, of course, that contracts are meaningless (except, again, for the athletes). Most of all, there is a higher goal at stake besides winning, that valuable lessons are to be imparted, including the aforementioned commitment and loyalty.

Then, the USC basketball team starts off 7-10, and in mid-January, with 14 more regular season games (all Pac-12 games, yet), a conference tournament and the NCAAs still ahead, athletic director Pat Haden cuts the cord.

The state of the program is better left to much smarter minds – specifically Mike DeCourcy’s; he’s already broken it down beautifully. But there’s still a huge problem. Not everybody shares this notion, but if a college coach gets fired in midseason, there had better be a much stronger reason than losing. Such as major NCAA violations, or laws broken either on campus or in the community. (See: Penn State football.)

Again, athletes are held to their commitments with an iron fist, while being subject to termination of their one-year renewable scholarship at any time. The NCAA’s recent proposal to guarantee more years on the scholarship have been stonewalled by the schools constantly.

In exchange for that, keeping the coaches who brought those players in on hand at least through the regular season isn’t too much for the players to ask.

Otherwise, it’s just the Nets bagging Avery Johnson last month, or the Chiefs cutting loose Todd Haley last season. The recent trend of firing college coaches after as few as two years—or, in the case of Southern Miss football coach Ellis Johnson, one year—is bad enough.

The excuse for Johnson’s firing: an 0-12 record. But at least he got a full season.

Kicking O’Neill to the curb after half a season, following three full ones, was surely about the bottom line alone As of now, there appears to be nothing else going on in the program that was such a disaster, within what is supposed to be the big picture, that warranted cutting him off before the entire season played out.

It’s only when held up to another standard—the pro standard—that it’s logical.

If that’s the case, end the charade about education and stop the claptrap about the loftier ideals that make the college game preferable to the pros. They hold players to contracts while refusing to call them “contracts,” and play fast and loose with the contracts of their coaches and others'. And when the losses pile up, heads will roll.

“Play Like a Trojan”? USC, you’re playing like the Nets. At least have the decency to admit it.